Spring at Saddle Run Read online

  “No,” Dara insisted before another pause. “But he hasn’t since then. I stopped him, but I have kissed him. I liked it. It made me feel sort of light-headed. And maybe a little confused.”

  Millie thought that was a very accurate description of kissing.

  “Sometimes, I want him to touch me,” Dara went on, “but not touch me, touch me, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Millie assured her. She gathered her breath. “It’s your right to say no, to push Ian’s hand away or tell him to slow down. If he doesn’t, it’s okay to remind him your father has an axe.”

  Dara laughed. “Ian’s terrified of Dad.”

  “As he should be.” Because it felt like the right thing to do, Millie kissed her cheek. “And if you ever need to talk to anybody about this, just call me. We’ll get together for a post-research root beer float.”

  “I’d like that.” The happiness in her voice and smile were the real deal. So was the hug she gave Millie.

  So was the stiffness that suddenly came into Dara’s arms and shoulders.

  The girl pulled back, her gaze fixed on Millie’s purse. Millie looked down, and she cursed when she saw that she hadn’t zipped up said purse. The kits were right on top of the rest of the stash, and it was very easy to read the label.

  One-Step Pregnancy Test.

  “Millie?” Dara said.

  “They’re not for me,” Millie blurted out as fast as she could. “They’re for a friend. Or rather were for a friend, but—” She stopped rambling and waved that off. “They’re not for me,” she repeated.

  Dara didn’t exactly spew out a breath of relief. Maybe because she thought Millie wasn’t telling her the truth.

  “My mom bought one of those,” Dara said. “Right before she died, she bought one. I saw it in her shopping bag.”

  Millie felt her own arms and shoulders go stiff. Actually, every part of her did. “Was your mother pregnant?” Millie managed.

  Dara shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.” Dara’s tone wasn’t of grief or sadness from memories. It was more like somber curiosity. “But if Mom was pregnant, she must have told Dad.”

  Millie could think of a huge reason why Ella might not have done that. And that huge reason was one that caused Millie’s heart to drop to her feet.

  Ella could have been pregnant with Royce’s child.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JOE PARKED AT Three Sheets and started walking toward Millie’s shop. There were a couple of people smoking in the parking lot, and several cars passed him as he strolled along. One of those cars belonged to Alma Parkman, and she beeped the weird-sounding horn on her equally weird-looking car and gave him a friendly wave.

  It was entirely possible that every single person who saw him knew he was going to see Millie. Knew, too, that they had plans to play out the fully loaded lock and key game.

  He’d already heard murmurs about someone spotting their vehicles at the drive-in. Nobody had dared question him about it though. His widower label acted like a shield against nosy questions like that.

  Well, for most people, anyway.

  He had no doubts that if he ran into Laurie Jean, Asher or Janice, they’d have a thing or two to say about him being with Millie. If that happened, Joe could blow it off, but he hated that Millie might be getting the third degree over him.

  She didn’t let things like gossip slip and slide off her the way he could. She still had a family reputation to protect. That’s why he was going to give her an out about having sex with him. He would go in Once Upon a Time, tell her they had to talk—which they did—and he’d tell her what he’d found in the storage unit Ella had rented. After he got her take on it, he’d insist she rethink their sex plans for the night. It wouldn’t be easy to convince his body that was the right thing to do, but it was. He was sure of that.

  Almost sure, anyway.

  Joe walked to the back of the shop, glanced around, and when he didn’t spot anyone, he tapped on the door. It opened almost immediately, and Millie took hold of his arm, pulling him inside. At first he thought that was so he wouldn’t be seen, but no. With the door still wide-open, she took his mouth in a hot, hungry kiss.

  And he took her mouth right back.

  Oh, man. He was toast. She tasted way too good. In fact, everything about her was way too good. She slid her arms around his neck, fit her body to his and just kept on kissing the daylights out of him.

  “I missed you,” she said, her voice all sin and breath when she finally pulled back from him.

  “I missed you, too,” he admitted.

  Which, of course, was the opposite of what he should be saying to her. So much for doing the right thing and insisting she rethink this. Instead, he was rethinking his notion about her rethinking. Right now, he wanted her more than his sanity.

  She grasped his hand to tug him the rest of the way inside. She finally closed the door, locked it and looked up at him. It was dark in the alcove where they were standing, and the only light came from the various displays throughout the shop. Still, he had no trouble seeing her dazzling smile.

  “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” she asked.

  He saw some nerves edging through the dazzle and the lust, and Joe knew he was the reason for those nerves. After their earlier kiss in the barn, he’d told her, We’ll talk tonight, and she had probably been worrying about that all day. He should have just kept his mouth shut and waited until now to let her know that something was wrong. Except wrong wasn’t the right word. Confusing was a better word for it.

  “I went through Ella’s laptop this morning,” he started, and he watched Millie go still. “I found a bank account that she’d set up. She started it with the payment you made for the three paintings.”

  “You didn’t know about the account,” she said, her gaze combing over his face.

  He shook his head. “It’s not with a local bank but rather one in San Antonio.” Joe would let Millie draw her own obvious conclusions about that. Ella hadn’t used a bank in Last Ride because someone might have mentioned it to Joe.

  Millie sighed. “I guess I’ll have to check and see if Royce had a secret account, too.”

  He nearly said that probably wasn’t necessary, but it was. This can of worms was open now, and to move on with their lives, they needed to see everything inside. Even if what was inside hurt like hell.

  “There’s more,” Joe added a moment later. “When I looked at the bank statement, I saw that Ella had rented a storage unit. Again, not the one that would have been close to the ranch but one just outside of town. I went there this morning, and opened it.”

  Her breath made a wheezing sound when she sucked it in. “What did you find?” Her voice was a whisper, and she was probably imagining all sorts of worst-case scenarios.

  “Paintings,” Joe said.

  “Paintings?” Now she sounded confused but also a little relieved.

  “Fourteen of them. I remember her painting some of them. By that, I mean I’d poke my head in her studio every now and then and see bits and pieces of what she was working on, but after she died, I didn’t even think about what’d happened to them.” He paused. “There was also one I hadn’t seen before. It was of Royce.”

  He could practically feel her heart sinking to the pit of her stomach.

  “It was the only portrait in the room,” he went on. Just get it all out. Say it and get it over with. “Royce, wearing a suit and sitting in an impressive-looking chair positioned in front of a window.”

  The man had looked like a pompous dick. But Joe admitted that maybe his feelings for Royce were playing into that.

  “There were no paintings of them together?” Millie asked.

  Joe shook his head. “But there were some sketchbooks in there that I didn’t look at. I will, but I’d had enough for one day.”

 
The silence hummed between them and somewhere in the shop several clocks began to chime out the nine o’clock hour.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and a heartbeat later, he followed it up with his own, “I’m sorry.” It was Joe who continued.

  “I’m apologizing because I didn’t want to mess up this night for you.”

  Her next breath was long and weary. “Well, I’m going to have to mess up your night, too. While I was with Dara today, she mentioned that her mom had bought a pregnancy test just a couple of days before she died.”

  Oh, great. This had reared its ugly head.

  “Yeah, I knew about it,” he admitted. “She left the goodbye note for me on the receipt for the damn thing. According to her note, she was heading out for a spa day. We both know that wasn’t her actual plan.”

  Millie groaned, then cursed. She turned, marched a few steps out of the alcove. The kind of marching somebody did when trying to walk off a fit of anger. “Was she pregnant?”

  “I don’t know. If she was, she didn’t say a word about that to me.”

  Of course, there were a lot of words his wife hadn’t said to him. The pregnancy test, going off with a married man, the bank account, the storage unit and that sonofabitching portrait of Royce.

  Millie continued to pace a couple more seconds before she turned back to him. “Maybe Ella was buying the test for someone else.”

  The thought had occurred to him during those times when he’d wanted to hang on to the pipe dream that his wife had loved him and hadn’t cheated on him with a pompous dick.

  “Maybe,” he acknowledged, not sounding at all convinced of that.

  But there was something about Millie’s reaction. Something below the surface. Maybe because she’d bought such a test for someone.

  Ah, hell.

  “Dara didn’t bring up the pregnancy test because she needs one, did she?” Joe snapped.

  Millie laughed, and even though he didn’t usually like being laughed at, it helped his insides unclench. “No,” she quickly assured. “Dara has no need for something like that. She’s got boy boundaries, Joe, and you don’t have to worry about her.”

  He hoped to hell boy boundaries meant Dara would knee Donnelly’s kid in the balls if he crossed the line with her.

  Smiling again, she went to him and pressed her hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry all of this spoiled the mood for the night. We can still have a drink or a bite to eat. Or we can go upstairs and look at some Victorian porn.”

  Joe had been about to kiss her good-night and tell her to get some rest, but that last thing stopped him in his tracks.

  “Victorian porn?” he asked.

  She smiled, nodded. “It helps me get my mind off things. Remember that antique vibrator in the True or False display?” She didn’t wait for him to respond, probably because she knew there was no way he’d forget something like that. “Well, there’s a whole room of that kind of stuff. Actually, there’s more than one room of it but only one for the Victorian era.”

  It was such a guy thing to want to see it, and Joe didn’t resist one little bit when Millie took him by the hand and led him up the narrow back stairs that led to a landing with two equally narrow halls. There’d been no major renovations here, no walls removed to create the open spaces below for the shop.

  They went past a bedroom, the one where Millie had no doubt planned for them to spend their evening, and he felt a pang of guilt that he was going to ask her to postpone that. A pang of heat, too, because his body didn’t want to postpone anything. He wanted her now, but then, he always did whenever he was around her.

  Still clutching his hand, they went by another room, this one crammed with antiques. No porn, not that he recognized as such, anyway, but he spotted spinning wheels, old farm tools and dozens of clocks. She stopped outside a door, one with a handwritten sign that read, “Nothing in here goes downstairs. Nothing! I mean it.”

  “The Victorian porn room,” she announced, throwing open the door.

  It was plenty cluttered, too, with boxes, machines and gadgets, none of which looked very porn-like. Well, none until Millie took down one of the boxes and opened it. It was a box of dildos.

  And other stuff.

  “Apparently, the Victorians liked variety when it came to objects they inserted in various orifices,” she explained as if describing a potato masher instead of something that’d obviously been used for sex.

  She held up a two-dick dildo made of shiny leather. It even had four leather balls that dangled down from it and would have almost certainly slapped a thigh or two once it was set into motion. The second one Millie pulled from the box was made of stone and was triple the normal size of a man’s dick.

  “You could call this an early version of an inflatable doll,” she continued. “I don’t touch it because I’m not sure Victorian men cleaned up after themselves.”

  This time, she took out a wooden box and opened the lid to reveal a woman’s mouth. The red cloth mouth was wide-open to reveal a deep, padded throat. It definitely didn’t arouse Joe or give him one grain of desire to put his dick in there, but it obviously took all kinds.

  She set down the box, took out another one. “Rectal dilators,” she explained, showing him the assortment of butt plugs, including some with what appeared to be a rough sandpaper texture.

  Yeah, all kinds.

  “Where’d you get all of this?” he asked.

  “My grandmother left it up here. She’d buy entire estates, sight unseen, and apparently, several of those estates had red rooms that would put Christian Greys to shame. There are pictures and devices from several historical periods, but there was so much Victorian stuff that it got its own room.”

  Closing the box, she pointed to a weird-looking toy horse. “That’s called an action saddle.”

  She pulled the rope reins, and the saddle began to move, following the movements of the reins. According to what was painted on the side of the horse’s neck, the action saddle was for “Inspiriting pleasure.”

  “Inspiriting pleasure,” Millie emphasized. “They used spanking machines for that.” She pointed to several. “And there were also squirting machines.”

  Millie motioned toward several copper hose–looking deals that poked up like striking snakes. “The idea with those was to fill up that tank.” She pointed out something that looked like the skin left behind from those shedding, striking snakes. “It’s some kind of animal bladder, and the pump would send the water into the hoses so you could squirt water at your genitals.”

  Joe shook his head, wondering just how the notion of that had come about.

  Millie grinned at him. “Has this gotten your mind off your troubles?”

  “Yeah,” he had to admit.

  “Works every time,” she muttered.

  He could see that. She was looking a hell of a lot happier than she had when they’d come up the stairs. “When you said porn, I thought you meant it’d be more...titillating.”

  “Titillating,” she repeated with a wink. “Now, that’s an interesting word because the Victorians were big into that, too.”

  She hauled down a big box that’d been stacked on top of other big boxes, and she balanced it on the Inspiriting Pleasure Action Saddle. The moment she lifted the lid, Joe saw what she meant. There were dozens of pictures, many with women’s breasts as the primary focus point.

  “These are the tame ones,” she explained, fishing down one layer. “These are less tame,” Millie added.

  She came up with photos where women, and men, were spread-eagle, displaying their wares while also displaying goofy smiles that seemed more suited for a pleasant parlor game of cards rather than the game they were gearing up to play.

  “These aren’t anywhere in the realm of tameness,” Millie warned, and when she drew out more shots, Joe could see that the “show your junk” game had turne
d into put cocks and other hard objects inside things. Vaginas, mouths, devices, between breasts. But there were other games in progress, too.

  “They really liked whippings and spankings,” Joe remarked.

  Millie made a sound of agreement while continuing to fish out more and more pictures. These were penetration shots, mainly cocks into vaginas, but the participants were still sporting those goofy smiles.

  “Notice there’s not one of them in a missionary position,” she pointed out. “That probably has something to do with not being able to get a good shot if the man and woman are smooshed together.”

  Joe looked up at her when he heard the slight shift in her tone. “You don’t like missionary?”

  She didn’t smile, goofy or otherwise. Instead, her forehead bunched up as if giving that some thought. “No one’s ever asked me that before, but no, I don’t especially like it.”

  Intrigued, Joe pushed a little harder. “Any particular reason? Like claustrophobia, not being in control?”

  She shook her head. “It has to do with spit.”

  Joe was certain he gave her a blank, confused look, and she laughed.

  “I think it goes back to when I was a kid. Tanner would tackle me, hold me so I couldn’t get away and spit in my hair. It got him grounded every single time he did it, but despite my joy over him being punished, I think it set me up to remember snotty spit when I’m being pinned down.”

  “So, no missionary when—” He stopped, remembering that he shouldn’t be going there right now.

  Turning fully to face him, Millie studied his expression. “Did you come here tonight to remind me that it can’t be anything but just sex between us?” She paused, studying his face. “No, you came here to tell me that you’d reconsidered doing my lock and key lesson?”

  He nodded. Cursed. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  She licked her lips. Then, leaned in and licked his. “Still want to do the right thing?”

  Joe didn’t even have to think about this. “No.”

  He pulled Millie to him and started inspiriting some pleasure.